Japanese startup to use AI to translate manga

A Japanese startup said Tuesday it aims to use artificial intelligence to help translate manga comics into English five times faster and 90% cheaper than at present,Azernews reports, citing The Japan Times.

Manga series such as "One Piece" and "Dragon Ball" are a huge success story for Japan, with the market projected to be worth $42.2 billion by 2030, according to the startup, Orange.

But it said only about 2% of Japan's annual output of 700,000 manga volumes are released in English, "partly due to the difficult and lengthy translation process and the limited number of translators."

But with its technology, Orange aims to produce 500 English-language manga per month, five times more than the industry's current capacity, and 50,000 volumes in five years. Other languages will come later.

"Compared to translation of a book, translating Japanese used in manga, which uses very short sentences of conversational language often full of slang, is extremely difficult," said Orange's marketing vice president Tatsuhiro Sato.

"It is also difficult to figure out if a particular quote was actually said at a scene, or if the line was a murmur inside one's heart describing a mental landscape," Sato said.

Other challenges include the original text often being written vertically and finding equivalents for Japan's many onomatopoeic words.

The firm announced that it had raised 2.92 billion ($19 million) in funding from major publisher Shogakukan and nine venture capital groups including the government-backed JIC Venture Growth Investments.

It said that its tool will also help the industry fight piracy in the industry, which is estimated to be worth $5.5 billion annually according to the Content Overseas Distribution Association.